South Canterbury Times. MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 1897.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 8737, 25 January 1897, Page 2

South Canterbury Times. MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 1897.

A good many people in New Zealand condemn Mr Seddon, and the majority of the Liberal Party for their Labour Legislation, co-operative work system, and other legislative and administrative efforts and aims in behalf of the working classes. Probably some of those efforts have been ill-judged, but as there is so little guidance obtainable from experience elsewhere, they must, many of them, have been experimental, and the most fitting criticisms that can be passed upon them is that instead of being looked upon by their authors as experiments, to be mended if possible, to be extended if necessary on their proving satisfactory, they have been too much treated as perfect and final. As to the general condemnation of Labour Legislation and management, one of the most philosophic of British politicians, Mr John Morley, would not join in that chorus In a recent speech relating to employments and national prosperity he said: —“The great master problem for the British statesman is, finding himself face to face with the vast aggregates of population in great centres and in smaller circles to put them in such a condition that they so far as possible had steady work and good wages. He was the last man to say that the statesman could ensure steady work and good wages. There were great economic tides and currents flowing, which were quite beyond the control of a given statesman or a given Government or a given community. But that was the consideration upon which the wise statesman kept his eye fixed. In a community like their own, if the population had got steady work and good wages, he might be sure that order was safe, that his task of governing was eased, and that the empire in which he was concerned, with its pillars and foundations stood secure.” These are wise words. A Government may not be able to ensure steady work and good wages, to all who require them; but that is what a wise statesman will aim at. So long as one man is in want of work and wages there must be hundreds or thousands in fear of such want, and the unemployed man is a living threat against the security of employment of all his employed neighbours, as well as a sufferer himself.

Touching on the unemployed problem, Mr Morley admitted that its solution is by no means so easy a thing as it looks. Hitherto the experiments that had been ‘made bad been, as in the caep.of the

German farm colonies, in the direction of removing people from the ordinary labour market, and securing to these selected ones permanent employment; but such experiments do not touch the evil arising from fluctuating employments. This remark applies almost equally to the New Zealand cooperative works system, as now carried on. If these works were stopped whenever there was a demand for labour elsewhere, they would then take their place as a valuable equaliser of the demand for labour, which at present they do not. Mr Morley advocates the making of as many different experiments as possible by the local bodies, as in time some good scheme would be sure to be hit upon, and then “ What one smaller community did successfully might in the fulness of time and with regard to the conditions of the case be extended over a wide area, and be resorted to by the community as a whole.”